Category: Doerr’s Way

Ah, air conditioning. It cools our homes and apartments, offices and factories, shopping malls and restaurants, cars and subway trains. In 2016, there were 1.6 billion air conditioners worldwide, and by 2026, there will be six billion air conditioners and refrigerators and refrigeration units. Demand grows as global climate warms. Right now, over 90 percent …

While nine out of ten K–12 students attend our public schools, too few Americans know a lot about those schools. And too few grasp the seriousness of clericalists’ and privatizers’ growing attacks on them. Much of this reflects the poor job that media, print and broadcast, have done in reporting on school matters (aside from …

On May 16, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s utterly unqualified and virulently toxic education secretary, was the featured speaker at the Alfred E. Smith Foundation in New York City, with Cardinal Timothy Dolan in attendance. Her speech was a vicious attack on our public schools and on the provisions in three-fourths of our state constitutions that bar …

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of two important occurrences now largely out of the public eye: New York State’s last Constitutional Convention and subsequent referendum and the outbreak of Nigeria’s civil war.

With Donald Trump’s accession to the presidency, his appointment of billionaire Betsy DeVos as education secretary, and his choice of ultraconservative former Indiana governor Mike Pence as his backup, the stage is being set for something we might call the “Kuyperizing” of American education.